The Arab conquests that began in the 7th century CE represent one of the most expansive and enduring imperial projects ever undertaken. Emerging from the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam, Arab armies rapidly overran vast territories stretching from the Indus River in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. This was not merely a series of military victories but a systematic campaign of conquest, demographic transformation, cultural erasure, and subjugation that reshaped entire civilizations. Unlike other empires that often allowed conquered peoples to retain significant aspects of their identity, language, and autonomy in exchange for tribute, the Arab imperial model imposed a rigid hierarchy favoring Arab Muslims, incentivizing conversion through economic and social pressure, and gradually eradicating indigenous cultures through a process known as Arabization. The result was the near-total obliteration of pre-Islamic identities across North Africa, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Persia, accompanied by mass violence, enslavement, and policies that meet modern definitions of genocide and cultural genocide. At its core, Arab colonialism operated through a combination of military force, discriminatory legal systems, and long-term demographic engineering. The dhimmi status, codified in Islamic law, granted "protection" to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and later others, but only in exchange for perpetual subordination. Dhimmis paid the jizya tax—a financial penalty for refusing conversion—while facing restrictions on building places of worship, riding horses, testifying in court against Muslims, and even dressing in certain colors or styles to mark their inferiority. This was not tolerance but institutionalized humiliation designed to erode non-Muslim communities over generations. Conversion offered escape from these burdens, leading to a slow but inexorable Islamization. Where resistance persisted, violence was swift and brutal: cities razed, populations massacred or enslaved, and lands redistributed to Arab settlers. The scale of destruction during the initial conquests was staggering. In Persia, the Sassanid Empire—home to one of the world’s most advanced civilizations—collapsed by 651 CE. Zoroastrian fire temples were destroyed, priests executed, and sacred texts burned. Historians estimate millions perished in the wars and subsequent famines. In India, invasions beginning with Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 CE and continuing through figures like Mahmud of Ghazni and later Mughals resulted in what some scholars describe as the bloodiest chapter in human history. Temples were demolished by the thousands, libraries torched, and entire populations slaughtered or enslaved. Chroniclers like al-Utbi recorded Mahmud’s campaigns boasting of 50,000 Hindus killed in single battles. Over centuries, these invasions reduced India’s Hindu and Buddhist populations dramatically, with forced conversions and mass killings contributing to demographic shifts that persist today. North Africa provides perhaps the clearest example of Arab colonialism’s genocidal character. The indigenous Amazigh (Berber) peoples, along with Coptic Christians in Egypt and remnant Roman-Byzantine populations, faced systematic erasure. By the 11th century, Berbers were largely Islamized and partially Arabized, their languages marginalized, and ancient Christian communities extinguished. Arab settlers migrated in waves, intermarrying and imposing Arabic as the language of administration, religion, and commerce. This was no organic cultural exchange; it was enforced through tax incentives for conversion and penalties for resistance. The Hilalian invasions of the 11th century, sponsored by Fatimid rulers, unleashed Bedouin tribes that devastated agricultural lands and displaced natives, accelerating the process. Today, Berber activists decry this as "cultural genocide," with Arabic-dominant education systems and governments continuing to suppress indigenous languages in Algeria, Morocco, and Libya. The Arab slave trade further underscores the brutality of this imperialism. Lasting over 1,300 years—from the 7th century until the 20th—it enslaved an estimated 10–18 million Africans, dwarfing the Atlantic trade in duration and often in cruelty. Captives crossed the Sahara or Indian Ocean routes, with mortality rates as high as 80–90% due to castration (for male eunuchs), exhaustion, and disease. Unlike the transatlantic trade, which preserved some African cultural elements in the Americas, Arab slavery integrated survivors into households, erasing lineages through concubinage and forced assimilation. Few visible Afro-Arab communities remain because reproduction was deliberately curtailed—male slaves were routinely castrated, and children of concubines were absorbed as Arabs if Muslim. This trade was not peripheral but integral to the Arab imperial economy, funding caliphates and enriching elites. It targeted sub-Saharan Africans primarily but also included Europeans (via Barbary corsairs) and Central Asians. The Zanj Rebellion in 9th-century Iraq, where enslaved East Africans rose against their Abbasid masters, was crushed with extreme violence, highlighting the systemic oppression. In the Levant and Mesopotamia, indigenous Aramaic-speaking peoples—Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriac Christians—were reduced to minorities. The Pact of Umar, attributed to the second caliph, formalized their degradation: no new churches, no public religious displays, and mandatory deference to Muslims. Over centuries, this pressure, combined with periodic massacres (such as under the Fatimids or Ottomans), decimated these ancient communities. The 1915–1923 genocides under the Ottomans—killing 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and hundreds of thousands of Greeks—were the culmination of centuries-old patterns of eliminating non-Muslim and non-Turkic elements, often with Arab complicity in the collapsing empire. What distinguishes Arab colonialism as the worst form of genocidal policy is its success in masking destruction as divine mandate and cultural elevation. European colonialism, while horrific, often preserved indigenous languages and structures for administrative convenience, and its atrocities are widely acknowledged and condemned. Arab imperialism, by contrast, is romanticized as the "Golden Age" of Islam, ignoring the bloodbath that enabled it. Contributions to science and philosophy occurred despite, not because of, the conquests—often by non-Arab converts laboring under duress. The narrative of tolerance ignores how dhimmi rules created a pressure cooker: convert or languish as second-class citizens until your community vanishes. This erasure continues today. In Sudan, Arab-dominated governments pursued Arabization in Darfur and the south, leading to genocides against non-Arab Africans, with millions displaced or killed since the 1980s. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Kurds faced the Anfal campaign—a chemical weapons genocide killing up to 180,000—part of broader Arabization displacing hundreds of thousands from oil-rich Kirkuk. Even post-2003, tensions persist as Kurds reclaim lands, while Arab nationalists resist. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS revived classical jihadist tactics, slaughtering Yazidis and Christians in a bid to purify "Arab" Islamic lands. The double standard in global discourse is glaring. Western academia fixates on European sins while excusing or ignoring Arab ones, perhaps out of fear of Islamophobia accusations or lingering Orientalist guilt. Yet facts demand honesty: Arab colonialism lasted longer, affected more people, and achieved near-total cultural annihilation in many regions. It did not build diverse societies but homogenized them under Arab-Islamic hegemony, suppressing Berber, Coptic, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Persian identities. True justice requires recognizing that imperialism is not a European monopoly. Nations must preserve their authentic heritage against homogenizing forces. The victims of Arab colonialism—forgotten indigenous peoples whose languages, faiths, and histories were systematically destroyed—deserve remembrance. Only by confronting this history can the world address ongoing oppressions and affirm that no empire, regardless of its religious veneer, has the right to erase others. Arab colonialism stands as history’s most effective genocidal machine, not because it killed the most in raw numbers, but because it succeeded in making its victims disappear from the narrative altogether.